


When The Lights Go On Again

by FloriaTosca



Series: Self-Indulgent Post AoU Gen 'verse [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Returns, Dogs, Food, Friendship, Gen, Not Captain America: Civil War Compliant, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Psychological Trauma, Self-Indulgent, Slice of Life, Snarky Bucky, Stealth Crossover, not fully aou compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 17:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4401167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloriaTosca/pseuds/FloriaTosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Age of Ultron, Bucky and Steve find each other again.  And there's a dog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When The Lights Go On Again

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the WWII era song "When The Lights Go On Again (All Over The World)."

    Living with his closest friends from this century had its downsides.  Sure, in theory it was great to have people around who saw him as a person and not just as a living legend super soldier, but in practice it meant a little too much friendly nagging for Steve’s taste.  At least Natasha had stopped trying to set him up on dates, but she’d started sending him links to online articles about asexuality along with her usual cute spider pictures and “you are old” jokes.  Steve had no idea what that was about.  And Sam was in his own way the biggest damn male mother hen since, well, Bucky, and he tended to get on Steve’s case if he thought Steve was self-isolating - how isolated could a guy even get as the leader of a team with six other people plus support staff? - or burying himself in his work too much.  Steve didn’t know if his current project to read through the post-war work of Agatha Christie and Isaac Asimov counted as proper self-care by modern mental health professional standards, but now Sam teased him less about needing a hobby that didn’t involve jumping off things or antagonizing heavily armed Neo-Nazis.  

Every Thursday, barring a national emergency, Steve took the afternoon off, drove his motorcycle into town, and went to the library.  Stark had found this terribly funny for some reason and offered to buy Steve an Amazon Prime subscription, but that was missing the point, really.  It wasn’t just about the free books.  Steve needed a reason to make himself get out of the Avengers facility on a regular basis, and all the premium internet whatevers in the world couldn’t do that.  Rather the opposite, actually.

    Steve checked out his books ( _Pluperfect Pogo_ , _A Murder Is Announced_ , and _The Caves of Steel_ ), walked through the little community art gallery next to the library to see if there was anything new (there wasn’t), and decided to stop for a snack before he did any more errands or sight-seeing.  Steve had caught himself self-indulgently grumbling in his head about the decadence of the modern art scene while looking at some perfectly unobjectionable abstract watercolors by local high school students, which was a sure sign that his sugar was getting low.  

    There was a little cafe and deli with outdoor seating across the street from the library.  It was run by a family of Russian Jewish immigrants and made acceptable pirozhki and strudel even by Natasha and the twins’ standards.  Steve liked to stop there for his mid-afternoon snacks.  Steve felt a little extravagant buying restaurant food instead of packing a sandwich ahead of time like a sensible person, but he told himself that immigrant small-business people probably needed the money more than he did.  

    When Steve reached the cafe, he noticed that his favorite outdoor table - the one hardest to sneak up on - was occupied.  A very small silky-haired dog - Steve wasn’t certain of the breed, maybe some kind of little long-haired terrier - was sitting under the table with its leash tied around a chair leg.  The little dog started prancing around and wagging its curly tail as soon as Steve reached the seating area, although it only barked when Steve’s path to the cafe door took him past the table it was guarding.  “Easy there, little guy,” Steve said, as soothingly as possible.  “Your table is safe.”  Steve was a little worried that if the dog got any more excited it’d wind up tangling its leash in the table and chair legs.

    The front door was propped open in the heat, and even over the noise of the air conditioning system and fans Steve caught most of the conversation between Mrs. Spektor and her customer.  They were speaking Russian, so Steve didn’t understand all the words, but the guy seemed to be trying to buy some leftovers and meat scraps for - Steve had no idea what a “bolonka” was, but in context he was probably talking about his dog.  They eventually arrived at a mutually satisfactory bargain and the customer - whose voice was oddly familiar, now that Steve thought about it - wound up with a takeout container full of cabbage roll filling for his dog and a small borscht and water to go for himself.  Steve noticed that Mrs. Spektor gave him twice as much complimentary bread with his soup as usual.  The man thanked her and turned around to leave, and Steve finally got a glimpse of his face.

    “Bucky?!”

    “Yeah, Steve,” Bucky said, smiling faintly, “It’s me.”

    “Bucky, how long have you been here?  Do you need help?”  Bucky’s mental recovery had clearly progressed, but physically, his friend had seen better days.  He was wearing slightly shabby civilian clothes instead of his Winter Soldier combat gear, with long sleeves and gloves despite the heat.  Steve couldn’t see any obvious injuries and Bucky seemed reasonably clean, though scruffy, but his face looked thinner under the unkempt beard and he didn’t look like he’d been getting enough sleep.

    “Been in town for a few days.  And I probably do need help, but I’m not sure there’s much you can do about it.  They’re not really the kind of problems you can punch.”

    “Hey, I have other talents!” Steve protested.  “But okay, I admit, unpunchable problems are more Sam and Natasha’s area.”  Finally, the full implications of what was going on sank in.  Bucky was right there, talking to him.  Not the Winter Soldier, _Bucky_.  Suddenly the distance between Steve and the deli counter seemed much too far.  “Bucky,” Steve said.  “Could you come over here?”

    “Sure, pal,” Bucky said.  “Just let me put the soup down, okay?”  

    Steve had only planned to throw a companionable “hey buddy I’ve missed you” arm around Bucky’s shoulder, but as soon as Bucky set his food down, Steve pulled Bucky into his arms and clung like a lovestruck octopus.  He hadn’t intended to be quite so enthusiastic about it, but after two years of grief followed by a year of worry, Steve had a lot of feelings built up.

    Perhaps fortunately, before Steve could squeeze the breath out of his friend like a cuddly python, they were interrupted when Mrs. Spektor tapped Steve on the shoulder with a wooden spoon.

    “So it’s ‘Bucky’, is it?” she said.  Bucky turned pale and looked at the floor.  “What else haven’t you been telling me, ‘Yasha who is fleeing from Neo-Nazis?’”

    _Yasha?  Right, Yakov, Jacob, James… I guess there’s no Russian equivalent to Buchanan_.  “James is his real name, ma’am,” Steve said.  “Bucky is a childhood nickname.  And the part about escaping from Neo-Nazis is all true.”  Bucky nodded, but still wouldn’t look Steve or Mrs. Spektor in the face.

    “Well, if _Captain America_ vouches for him, I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Spektor said, a little more warmly.  She turned to Bucky.  “Go feed your ridiculous dog.  And be sure to eat all your borscht.  You’re looking too thin, bubbeleh.”  She had a point - Bucky had lost weight since the helicarriers, although he was still solid muscle.  Bucky nodded, picked up his food, and fled for the door.  Steve had to force himself not to run after him.

    _Bucky’s not going anywhere_ , Steve told himself sternly.   _He’s just going out to eat his lunch.  He can’t take off in a hurry, he’d have to untangle his dog first.  And even if he does leave, you’re still better off than you were this morning.  Now you know that he’s free and in one piece and he remembers you.  Now eat something before you get maudlin_. Steve ordered his usual, but he bought double portions of everything.  If Bucky’s enhancements were anything like Steve’s, he probably had a heightened metabolism, and a small serving of borscht wasn’t going to go very far for him even with extra bread.

    When Steve left the cafe with his pirozhki and apple rolls, he saw that Bucky was still in the seating area, and was, in fact, still crouching on the ground trying to untangle his dog from the limbs of the table and chairs.  “Dammit, punk,” Steve heard him muttering.  “Would it kill you to learn how to back up?”  

    “Can I help you?” Steve asked, as he approached their table.

    “You can.  Just keep an eye on this little idiot-” he scritched the dog behind its ears affectionately - “while his leash is off.  I have to unhook it to untangle it.  Somebody thought it would be fun to make spiderwebs.”

    The leash proved a lot easier to untangle without an excited lapdog at one end, and Bucky was soon finished.  While they were eating, Steve asked “How did you wind up with this little rich-lady dog anyway?”

    “Short answer: I found him.  Long answer: I found him, and I’d have to tell you most of what I’ve been up to for the past year to explain the circumstances.”

    “What have you been doing, Buck?  Sam and I found a few trashed Hydra hideouts on the East Coast and then - nothing.  We were worried.”

    Bucky sighed.  “First few months are kinda hard to explain.  I wasn’t a Hydra puppet anymore and I was making decisions, but I wasn’t really me either.  I still couldn’t remember much and the stuff Hydra did to my brain hadn’t all worn off yet.  First couple weeks I spent relearning how to survive on my own, which was an adventure in its own right.  Last time Hydra trusted me on my own for more than 72 hours was… I think it was the eighties?  And that was in Russia.”

    “At this point I was still pretty much the Asset, just not Hydra’s asset.  I needed a mission.  So after you were out of the hospital and capable of defending yourself again and you also had Handsome Wings Guy and Zap-Happy Redhead -”

    “You mean Sam and Natasha,” Steve said.

    “We haven’t exactly been properly introduced,” Bucky said dryly.  “Like I said, you could be your big stubborn self again and you had those two looking out for you, so I could go on to a new mission.  So I spent that time gathering information.”

    “Wait,” Steve said.  “What were you doing while I was in the hospital?”

    “Looking out for you, of course!  Who else was going to do it?  SHIELD, which was in shambles and probably pissed at you and also full of Hydra spies?  Your friend Sam?  Could he even use his wings in a hospital room without knocking all that sinister beepy stuff over?  The hospital staff?  You know doctors can’t be trusted.”

    “Why didn’t you say anything?” Steve asked.  He knew he probably sounded pathetic but he didn’t really care at this point.  “I could have helped you.”

    “Pal, at that point I didn’t even know if I liked you.  I just knew that you knew things about me that Hydra hadn’t wanted me to know and that you were important to me somehow.  But I had no facts to back that up.  Good thing you got so famous when you were in the ice, Stevie, or I’d have really been in trouble.”

    “Please tell me you didn’t see any of the movies,” Steve said.  Bucky looked worried.  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Buck,” Steve reassured him.  “It’s just that some of the movies are really bad.  And even the ones that are okay as movies made up a lot of stuff.”

    “Okay,” Bucky said thoughtfully.  “What about the books?”

    “I haven’t read enough of them to judge,” Steve said.  “It just got too weird, reading someone writing about me like I was a character in _Moby-Dick_ or _Hamlet_ instead of a real person.”  Bucky nodded thoughtfully at that, but whatever he was about to say next was interrupted by his little dog pawing at his leg.

    “Oh, no, everyone’s ignoring the dog,” Bucky said.  “This is terrible.”  Bucky leaned down to pet him.  “Someone call the ASPCA this minute.”

    Steve smiled.  “So your life just wasn’t complete without a tiny troublemaker to fuss over?” he teased.

    “You better believe it, Rogers,” Bucky said.  “If you hadn’t gone and gotten all huge I wouldn’t be in this situation.  Shit, Stevie, that came out wrong.  I didn’t mean it like that.”

    “You don’t need to apologize, Buck,” Steve said.  “That was perfectly true.  It was my fault.”

    “Actually, the way I see it, it was really Zola’s fault, for shooting me full of mad science muscle juice in the first place.”  Bucky sighed and looked very tired.  “Please, Stevie, can we talk about something else?”

    “Yes!  Of course!  Sorry!  Um, you still want to tell me how you got from hiding out from Hydra and reading history books to getting your dog?  And how did you wind up at Spektor’s, anyway?  This place is good and all, but not famous for it.”

    “That part’s simple,” Bucky said.  “I read your twitter.  As for the rest - sit back, it’s gonna be a long story.”  He scooped a little more food into the repurposed yogurt tub he was using as a dog bowl and continued “Early on, I didn’t really have an organized campaign against Hydra.  If there were any safe houses in the neighborhood, I’d raid them for anything useful and smash them up, but it was pretty opportunistic.  Unless they had a _chair_.”  From the way Bucky pronounced the word, it was clear that he wasn’t talking about bad taste in furniture.  “Those, I actually made plans for.  My brain was still kinda fried so they weren’t very good plans, but Hydra wasn’t really in the best shape either so it all worked out.”  Bucky’s body language didn’t really agree with the flippant tone of the words at all.  

“Then the withdrawal symptoms from the Hydra drugs finally wore themselves out and I could sleep properly, and that’s when I really started remembering stuff.  Not just scraps of images and feelings and ‘hey that looks familiar’ - real memory.  But I still didn’t really feel like me, so the memories felt - I don’t know how to describe it, but really weird.  Like a ghost being possessed by a living person?  And it was so damn distracting.  Like having tiny little flashbacks all the goddamn time.”

“And about this time, I learn about a small Hydra operation in the southwest that’s still active.  I’ve accumulated a decent weapons stash and some money and a couple changes of clothes, and I’ve had more practice acting like a person around civilians, so I decide to stop skulking around DC and New York and go after it.”

“I do manage to take them out, but the battle’s harder than it should have been.  My brain decided that this was a good time to start remembering things from when Zola was working on me and I’d had horrible nightmares all week, so I wasn’t really at the top of my game.  Plus my car got blown up so I had to steal something or hitchhike back to civilization.  And of course, Hydra chose the most isolated godforsaken part of the desert possible for their secret lab complex.”

“But fortunately, I got picked up by a lady soldier with a truck full of runaway harem girls before the sunstroke or dehydration got too bad.  You would’ve liked her, Steve, she reminded me a little of a more tomboyish version of Carter.”

“You remember Peggy?” Steve asked.

“Yep.  It’s amazing what fresh air and not having your brain fried will do for a guy,” Bucky said.  “Turns out they were running away from some two-bit cult leader with a Messiah complex - not Hydra, far as I know, just your average asshole megalomaniac - who spent his retirement money building his own personal kingdom in the desert.  And then I had my very own ‘what would Steve Rogers do?’ moment.  See, you can’t just go _away_ , you need somewhere to go to.  And their first option didn’t work out, so the women were wondering what to do next, and I brought up that the Jerk-Who-Would-Be-King already had water pumps and solar panels and all that good stuff, and even with the girls gone he was still merrily oppressing other people back home, so why not go back and overthrow him?  The women actually went along with this.  I think we’d all had too much sun by this point.”

“It sounds like a good idea to me,” Steve said.

“It would,” said Bucky.  “And the damnedest thing was, it worked.  So after the ladies overthrew the cult hierarchy and got started establishing liberty and justice for all and all that good stuff, I spent a few months with them helping out around the compound.  I was officially the chief of security but I spent most of my time learning to fix things.  Modern cars are complicated.”

“But then I saw you and your buddies fighting all those robots on the news and I decided it was time to come back.  Clearly, you need looking after.”

“You’re probably right,” Steve said.  “But how did you get the dog?”

“Oh, I found Punk here along a stretch of road in the desert trying to pick a fight with a lizard as big as he was.”

“Wait,” Steve said.  “Aren’t some of those giant lizards poisonous?”

“You tell _him_ that,” Bucky said.  “So you see that I couldn’t leave him on his own.  Little punk’d get his ass kicked by a mad enough jackrabbit, never mind a coyote or a gila monster.”

“I see,” Steve said, smiling.  That was just such a Bucky thing to do.  “Bucky,” Steve asked, “When you said I needed looking after, did that mean that you were intending to stick around?”

“Well, yes.  If you want me to and it wouldn’t cause problems with your team.  I don’t want to make things weird.”

“Bucky, nothing would make me happier.  And the team shouldn’t be a problem.  Sam and Natasha will be glad to see you.”

“Really?” Bucky asked dubiously.

“Well, they’ll be glad you’re feeling more like yourself and I’m not moping around worrying about you,” Steve admitted.  “And I don’t think Sam will miss all the searching.”

“How could I say no to a pitch like that?” Bucky said.  

“Thanks, Buck.  This means a lot to me,” Steve said.  “Can I call Sam and let him know what’s what?”

“Sure,” Bucky said.  “Someone should know I’m coming.”

Since hugging someone in the middle of eating soup was probably a bad idea and the table was in the way, Steve leaned across, smiled warmly, and clapped Bucky on the shoulder.  “Welcome home, Buck.”


End file.
